Nonfiction Literature

It must have been with deep reluctance that David Cameron, ever keen to sever the old school tie, had to admit that the Provost of Eton had been among his guests at Chequers last weekend. But perhaps it wasn’t William Waldegrave — minister for health under John Major and now a Conservative life peer — who was principally invited to talk high matters of state. The Londoner hears that it was his wife Caroline.

This year's cycling superstar Bradley Wiggins has withdrawn from a tax-avoidance scheme that was condemned by the Treasury, he announced today. He was criticised last week for using the reportedly Cayman Islands-based scheme, and in a long, wide-ranging interview in today's Guardian he says he has "instructed [his] advisers to withdraw [him] from the scheme with immediate effect".

BBC chairman Lord Patten made a speedy entrance and exit last night at a party he hosted to celebrate the launch of an online archive of Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America. Arriving in time to make his speech in which he praised Cooke as “one of the glories of the BBC, one of the greatest journalists of the 20th century and its greatest radio essayist”, Patten left before guests had a chance to chat.

Is Ffion Hague, wife of the Foreign Secretary, writing a book about an illicit gay love affair? The Grand Tour, Hague’s second book, will explore the intense and jealous relationship between the 18th-century poet Thomas Gray and his schoolfriend and architect Horace Walpole, the son of Britain’s first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole.